The tragedy of their romance lay in its non-fulfilment.  Beethoven was a man of noble nature, yet what had he to offer her in return for her love?  His own love, it is true.  But he was uncouth, stricken with deafness, and had many of the “bad moments” of genius.  He foresaw unhappiness for both, and, to spare her, took upon himself the great act of renunciation.  We need only recall him weeping over the picture of his Therese.  And Therese?  To her dying day she treasured his memory.  Very few shared her secret.  Her brother Franz, Beethoven’s intimate friend, knew it.  Baron Spaun also divined the cause of his melancholy.  Some years after the composer’s death, Countess Therese Brunswick conceived a great liking for a young girl, Miriam Tenger, whom she had taken under her care for a short period, until a suitable school was selected for her in Vienna.  When the time for parting came, Miriam burst into tears and clung to the Countess’s hand.

“Child!  Child!” exclaimed the lady, “do you really love me so deeply?”

“I love you, I love you so,” sobbed the child, “that I could die for you.”

The Countess placed her hand on the girl’s head.  “My child,” she said, “when you have grown older and wiser, you will understand what I mean when I say that to live for those we love shows a far greater love, because it requires so much more courage.  But while you are in Vienna, there is one favor you can do me, which my heart will consider a great one.  On the twenty-seventh of every March go to the Wahringer Cemetery and lay a wreath of immortelles on Beethoven’s grave.”

When, true to her promise, the girl went with her school principal to the cemetery, they found a man bending over the grave and placing flowers upon it.  He looked up as they approached.

“The child comes at the request of the Countess Therese Brunswick,” explained the principal.

“The Countess Therese Brunswick!  Immortelles upon this grave are fit from her alone.”  The speaker was Beethoven’s faithful friend, Baron Spaun.

In 1860, when the leaves of thirty-three autumns had fallen upon the composer’s grave and the Countess had gone to her last resting-place, a voice, like an echo from a dead past, linked the names of Beethoven and the woman he had loved.  There was at that time in Germany a virtuosa, Frau Hebenstreit, who when a young girl had been a pupil of Beethoven’s friend, the violinist Schuppanzigh.  At a musical, in the year mentioned, she had just taken part in a performance of the third “Leonore” overture, when, as if moved to speak by the beauty of the music, she suddenly said:  “Only think of it!  Just as a person sits to a painter for a portrait, Countess Therese Brunswick was the model for Beethoven’s Leonore.  What a debt the world owes her for it!” After a pause she went on: 

“Beethoven never would have dared marry without money, and a countess, too—­and so refined, and delicate enough to blow away.  And he—­an angel and a demon in one!  What would have become of them both, and of his genius with him?” So far as I have been able to discover, this was the first even semi-public linking of the two names.